Interconnecting Product and Process Information to Enable Personalized Production

Manufacturing paradigms are currently shifting from mass production towards mass customization and personalized products. Customers demand individual, high quality products that are tailored to their needs at a low cost and reasonable delivery times. The shoe and fashion industry is one example. Currently, mass customizing textile products is possible but comes with long delivery times due to fragmented supply chains that are distributed all over the world. Therefore, companies are under the pressure to reduce their time to market and to respond to the dynamic requirements regarding lot sizes, lead times, and cost. Moreover, companies will shift to regional production to be closer to the customer to flexibly react to the market and reduce delivery times. This paper presents an approach to model personalized products and interconnect this knowledge with information about the manufacturing system and production processes. The approach allows using product information to assist the worker during the manufacturing process to enable quickly switching between different products. Connecting the shop floor with the supervisory control facilitates adapting to new products. The approach is evaluated using an experimental setup. Results and future research directions are illustrated here.